Digital marketing automation is a game-changer in today’s fast-paced business world. Understanding digital marketing automation, its advantages, and its essential components is crucial for maximizing your online presence.

By leveraging this powerful tool, you can streamline repetitive tasks, optimize customer engagement, and drive impressive results. Transitioning seamlessly between different marketing channels, digital marketing automation empowers businesses to scale their operations efficiently.

Why you should read this article and what you will learn here:

• Why digital marketing automation is a real game-changer and changes a lot in the acquisition
• What differentiates digital marketing automation from online marketing
• What are the most important steps in the introduction of digital marketing automation
• Why digital marketing automation is suitable for both SMEs and the self-employed

The digitization of business processes is progressing faster and faster. There is hardly an industry in which business processes are not automated and digitized. This is accompanied by a paradigm shift in the design of customer relationships. What customers appreciate today is, on the one hand, the freedom that e-commerce and online trading have to offer them.

On the other hand, they do not want to be served and advertised anonymously but are looking for concrete and personalized solutions to their concerns, wishes, and problems. Personalization is one of the hottest megatrends.

Analysis by management consultancy McKinsey, A paradoxical situation arises for companies that are just as dependent on long-term customer loyalty and customer acquisition as they are on constant new customer acquisition. For example, how can mobile customers be reached and retained without the expense of personnel and marketing increasing immeasurably?

Large corporations have already reacted to this development by integrating processes that are referred to as marketing automation, digital marketing automation, or marketing automation. All three terms ultimately mean the same thing: It is about the automation of certain online marketing tasks that relieve the marketing department, simplify sales, and accelerate the entire sales process.

In general usage, the term digital marketing automation has prevailed. Digitization can achieve a degree of automation that is hard to imagine with conventional marketing measures.

What is Digital Marketing Automation?

Digital marketing automation is a combination of software, database, CRM, and CMS as well as various other modules and features that can be used to personalize, individualize, and automate tasks such as sending newsletters, providing content, making contact, and data visualization. This form is often referred to as “digital marketing”. But this term is too superficial and too generalizing. Digital marketing automation goes much further than simple digital marketing processes can.

As if that weren’t enough, digital marketing automation also offers a wide range of options for recording and tracking customer behavior.

Digital marketing automation can send personalized advertising or monitor marketing measures for their success or failure. International marketing specialists talk about behavior-based marketing or behavioral marketing. In addition, digital marketing automation can be used to integrate social media activities or company blogs into campaigns, intensify customer loyalty, and generate leads. But what are the marketing automation benefits and how does digital marketing automation work for small and medium-sized businesses?

Advantages and benefits of digital marketing automation

The easiest way to understand the benefits of digital marketing automation for companies and customers is to understand the phases of the so-called customer journey. These describe which points of contact with the company already exist before a customer buys a product. The “customer journey” is divided into five phases in classic marketing, namely in

• Awareness: The customer becomes aware of a product in which he is interested.
• Favorability: The customer’s need to decide in favor of the product increases.
• Consideration: An interest becomes a wish or desire.
• Intent to Purchase: The prospect receives the final nudge (a sales pitch) that drives them to buy.
• Conversion: The customer gives in to the wish and buys the product.

One or more touchpoints can be defined for each of these phases, through which the customer comes into contact with the product and/or the company. And it is precisely these points that can be used for a strategy of digital marketing automation.

For “awareness” to arise, for example, the interested party must become aware of the product – through targeted advertising measures. The initially fleeting interest can be increased the more you know and can find out about the potential customer.

If you use tools for digital marketing automation, you can make him an offer that strengthens his buying interest as soon as he makes first contact on your website or your social media channel.

For example, an information brochure or a price reduction, a solution to a typical problem associated with the purchase of this product, or a trial offer. What exactly is offered to the customer at what time can be precisely defined within the framework of digital marketing automation?

It is already clear at this point that no company will be able to capture and serve every customer’s interest individually. The consequence is that a high level of demand means that you have to disappoint numerous (potential) customers because you cannot respond to their specific interests. And this is exactly where digital marketing automation comes into play.

Digital marketing automation enables companies to simultaneously pursue and serve the interests of not only individual customers but hundreds or thousands of them. And exactly in such a way that an offer is made for each prospective customer that is tailored to his behavior and the point at which he is currently located. And without a great deal of human effort – because the digital marketing automation software analyzes customer behavior and uses it to calculate which information, offers or other measures are required to generate interest.

Digital marketing automation thus prepares the ground on which your online activities can thrive. And it helps you reap the rewards – through targeted interactions with customers and prospects. If the interested party has become a lead, it is passed on to sales – which has already involved some providers of solutions for digital marketing automation.

Advantages of digital marketing automation at a glance:

• Time and cost savings
• Reduction of personnel expenses
• Strengthening customer relationships
• Increase in conversion rate
• Faster sales growth

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New opportunities especially for SMEs through digital marketing automation

While large corporations recognized the possibilities of digital marketing automation relatively quickly and used them for themselves, small and medium-sized companies initially found it difficult to follow the development. People feared the effort as well as the investment, couldn’t assess the chances, or hoped to somehow be able to get by without digital marketing automation.

In the meantime, however, a market has also developed in the D-A-CH countries that enables SMEs to automate their marketing according to their own needs. With the clear goal of satisfying more customers and winning them over to their own company. Digital marketing automation is enjoying a growing number of interested parties today.

Advantages of digital marketing automation for SMEs and the self-employed at a glance

A business not using digital marketing automation is like a hunter aimlessly firing hundreds of rounds of pellets in the hope of hitting a random duck.

The targeted use of digital marketing automation opens up clear competitive advantages for SMEs that decide to do so. She offers them the laser scope for targeting the right prey.

This saves enormous marketing and sales costs. Every sales executive’s dream is a steady stream of pre-qualified leads. If, for example, field staff is sent to the customer for the first contact, the success rate is rather low, but the effort is very high. On average, only 20 percent of leads are ready to buy on first contact.

Digital marketing automation helps to qualify leads and use the expensive working time for seriously interested contacts.

Important tasks and areas in which digital marketing automation relieves and supports companies are, for example:

• identify customer interests
• understand customer behavior
• evaluate traffic
• lead generation
• Lead Qualification
• segmentation
• Measurement of specific customer interests
• relationship marketing
• trust-building
• cross-selling
• upsell
• contact maintenance
• customer retention
• Measuring Marketing ROI
• Simplify CRM and database maintenance
• Targeted and personalized customer approach via various message channels

Essential components of digital marketing automation are:

• Email Marketing
• Specific landing pages
• campaign management
• Measurement of specific customer behavior
• lead management
• CRM integration
• Podcast

A major advantage of digital marketing automation is the precise measurement of the success of individual automated campaigns. Follow-up actions can be optimized using the results. Behavioral email marketing is an essential part of digital marketing automation. In this way, individual interested parties or customers can be picked up based on their behavior with targeted and individually tailored follow-up campaigns if they have a specific interest. According to a study by Jupiter, companies that use email marketing based on recipient behavior have up to 350 percent higher open rates and up to 50 percent increases in conversions.

A highly recommended tool for communicating marketing messages is storytelling.

From the behavior of the customers, it is possible to deduce their interest. To do this, companies use so-called segmentation campaigns as part of digital marketing automation. Based on the source of the lead (on which landing page the lead nurturing was obtained), specific email campaigns are sent.

The behavior of the recipient is measured: Does the recipient open the e-mail, does he click on links there, if so, which ones, and how often, does he carry out further actions on the target page? From all these factors, the specific interest of the recipient can be deduced. Other digital marketing automation email campaigns build on these interests.

Cognitive neuroscience has discovered that information that meets as many of these six criteria as possible is processed better in the brain.

Marketing automated campaigns based on concrete and specific customer interests are more interesting, meaningful, meaningful, and often appear more credible to the recipient. Digital marketing automation for SMEs, as it is available all over the world today, does not have to be operated on your servers. Numerous companies already offer inexpensive solutions for digital marketing automation from the cloud, which can be individually adapted to the needs of your company.

Future Prospects for Digital Marketing Automation

The interest in digital marketing automation is constantly increasing. In the last five years, the number of searches for the keyword “marketing automation” has increased by 300 percent, as shown in the graph of the query from Google Trends.

Many companies are now confronted with a new quality of customers. Today’s customer is enlightened, and critical, and doesn’t get caught up so quickly by full-bodied marketing promises. In addition, there is an ever-increasing sensory overload. As a result, the attention span is getting shorter and shorter.

Customers want the information they are looking for quickly and specifically. Digital marketing automation offers tremendous opportunities here. If we think of the customer who surfs the web largely anonymously, digital marketing automation can also be understood as an effort to take some of this anonymity from online marketing and replace it with a more intensive and personal customer experience.

Digital marketing automation makes it possible for companies to expand their business processes almost indefinitely with minimal effort and small investments and still serve every prospective customer or existing customer who occasionally drops by as if they were regular customers.

Such individual processes can hardly be implemented without digital marketing automation. For this to succeed, a vast amount of data must be collected, evaluated, and interpreted. And that is exactly what good digital marketing automation software programs do. In many cases, individual modules are bundled into an effective marketing tool.

In this way, virtual customers always have the feeling that they are receiving answers and solutions, products and services that are tailored to their original inquiries or their search behavior. And you can sleep better at night again because you can confidently delegate both the monitoring and all other automatable processes to the digital marketing automation software.

It is up to the customer whether in the future they will go shopping online themselves or place an order with their empty fridge. For you as an entrepreneur, on the other hand, what counts is that the exact coordination of customer interests on the one hand, and digital marketing on the other hand significantly optimizes the exchange of information and communication, the ordering process, and sales.

Ultimately, with the help of digital marketing automation, not only can new customers be won, but customer loyalty can also be intensified.

Capture customer interests and implement adequate campaigns

Imagine you want to inspire customers and prospects with your new offer. To be able to carry out the campaign successfully, a wide range of action steps and work processes have to be mastered. You need to prepare text and images for different sales channels, populate customer data, do search engine optimization, customize order forms, create landing pages, respond to requests coming in via social media, your website, phone, or email, and so on.

What a hassle! The crux of the matter: As with classic junk mail, you never know exactly whether you will reach your customers and prospects at a suitable time. Whether you made the right choice. And how your automated campaigns are received. Now imagine that you knew from every single customer and serious prospect what he is currently interested in, how best to reach him, and what problems or wishes make him call up your offer.

You know his name and his shopping behavior, you are standing next to him at the moment he is checking a product from your range and you can give him a convincing sales argument.

And now continue to imagine that you could do this not just for a single customer at the same time, but for hundreds, thousands, and more. Instead of sending the same message to all your customers and prospects thousands of times, respond to thousands of different inquiries as individually as possible. And it all works automatically.

Digital marketing automation offers exactly that! If you understand what this means for your company, you can also understand the opportunities and opportunities that digital marketing automation opens up. In the future, your campaigns can be divided into automated sections that make it possible to recognize individual customer interests and react to them appropriately at every point.

So while customer A is downloading a catalog, customer B receives a voucher, customer C is forwarded to a landing page, customer D orders your newsletter and customer E communicates with you via the social media account. All activities are recorded as part of digital marketing automation and evaluated for future marketing campaigns.

Important Tip:

One tip for effective marketing strategies is to understand your target audience deeply. By knowing their needs, preferences, and pain points, you can tailor your messaging, content, and automated campaigns to resonate with them. This targeted approach will not only grab their attention but also build a stronger connection, leading to increased engagement and conversions

Digital marketing automation is also suitable for the self-employed

Interested parties are won with a blog article and a targeted Google Adwords campaign. As part of digital marketing automation, additional added value on the topic is offered free of charge on the blog article. The first step in digital marketing automation is measuring behavior.

Readers of the article who request the added value offered show a different attitude than those who do not pursue it. Systems of digital marketing automation measure this and subsequently offer information and offer individually tailored to the behavior.

Depending on which offers a new contact uses, the digital marketing automation system will send out further offers and information. In this way, contacts are qualified and lead acquisition costs are quickly offset. With a good digital marketing automation system, it is possible to recoup all lead generation costs within 30 days.

Further process steps of digital marketing automation direct the already qualified lead to one of the three customer groups. The more qualified a lead is, the higher the quality of the other offers that are sent as part of digital marketing automation. In this case, digital marketing automation ensures that this expert only has personal contact with interested parties if they already know him, appreciate his expertise and there is a minimum level of trust.

For digital marketing automation, measures must be developed individually for the company. Especially in expert marketing, i.e. for all service providers, consultants, trainers, or coaches, the qualification of leads with a webinar funnel is ideal for digital marketing automation.

On a special landing page, contacts are picked up with a video about your burning problem. A webinar designed according to special criteria for digital marketing automation offers initial solutions. This conveys the company’s expertise credibly and creates trust.

All participants of the webinar who stay with us until the end will then be presented with additional offers through digital marketing automation. This could, for example, be a questionnaire that further qualifies the customer.

First steps toward digital marketing automation

A problem for small and medium-sized companies, which have so far hardly dealt with the possibilities of digital marketing, is the selection of the necessary tools and the right provider for the introduction of digital marketing automation. Anyone who is just beginning to get an overview will be surprised at how far the development has progressed. For SMEs in particular, it is, therefore, advisable to select a provider who

• specializes in solutions for smaller businesses;
• offers comprehensive advice and cost-effective implementation as well as regionally available training courses;
• enables an individual selection of the required modules;
• offers solutions from the cloud;
• low monthly fees calculated according to a transparent system that is advantageous for your company.

When it comes to the costs of digital marketing automation, there are significant differences. The price ranges for the fees incurred are in the two to four-digit range. It is therefore worth taking a closer look at which modules and services your company needs. A solution that includes the following components is generally recommended:

• CRM system or option to integrate an existing system
• Messenger and email message creation tool
• Tools that make it easy to create and manage content
• Software components that make it possible to subdivide and bundle workflow automation
• Social media monitoring tool
• Tools for tracking and measuring success

Another decisive factor when choosing your provider for digital marketing automation is whether you work in the B2C or B2B sector. Some providers are also completely focused on inbound marketing, while others also allow tools for outbound marketing to be integrated.

HubSpot and Marketo are market leaders who also offer digital marketing automation for SMEs. Both companies currently share about 50 percent of the market share, with HubSpot’s share predominating.

Significantly smaller, but highly valued by customers in the region, is the provider Act-On, which is certainly also since the American company also offers support in German and French.

The provider Agile CRM, which has web-based marketing, sales, and service tools in its range, is particularly cheap but still reliable. For digital marketing automation, for example, Agile CRM marketing tools can be used

• optimize workflow automation,
• generate landing pages,
• Integrate social media and contacts into campaigns,
• Prepare and execute email campaigns
• operate mobile messengers.

You will find a large number of other smaller providers online who have specialized in the needs of SMEs in terms of digital marketing automation.

Digital Marketing Automation: Is it five to twelve already?

Designing an online presence, CMR, CMS, developing your app, sending newsletters, using social media and messengers – you have mastered all this and more in the past few years and may now be faced with the question: Does digital marketing automation also have to be done? being?

Perhaps it will calm you down if you realize that software tools for digital marketing automation do not require any additional marketing activity, but on the contrary, ensure that your previous activities are bundled and used more efficiently. So you don’t use even more tools, but others that relieve you of a large number of tasks.

The prerequisite for making it worthwhile for you to get started with digital marketing automation is that you are already using the World Wide Web to reach your customers, generate new customers, and make your products or services accessible to a large number of interested parties.

If this is the case, then it is not five to twelve for the consideration of digital marketing automation, but already high noon, so it is high time to act. The reason for this lies in the paradigm shift mentioned at the beginning, which is redefining the relationship between consumers and companies. The customer is no longer king, he wants to commit himself as little as possible and still be addressed and advertised personally.

However, it can also be observed that many people can be enticed by clever e-commerce solutions, affiliate programs, advertising banners, targeted campaigns, and forms of communication as well as by the excellent organization of marketing and sales to turn from virtual casual customers into satisfied regular customers.

Digital marketing automation offers you and your company a wide range of opportunities to carry out this paradigm shift and thus retain existing customers and win new customers.